Jul17Written by:SuperUser Account
7/17/2010 12:43 PM 
By Mary Jo Foley | July 16, 2010, 3:01pm PDT
At this week’s Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft officials shared with attendees their “official” roadmap for updating the company’s hosted Business Productivity Online (BPOS) suite. Company officials shared which features and capabilities that the company rolled out already as part of the on-premises server complements of the BPOS products will be added to the Microsoft-hosted versions of those offerings.
I’ve run a few slides on this blog over the past couple of months, dating back to November 2009, that included much of this same information. But it wasn’t until this week that Microsoft officials acknowledged these details.
I’ve heard that customers of the Dedicated (i.e., non-shared/non-multitenant) versions of Microsoft’s BPOS and its point-product parts — Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Communications Online and Live Meeting — already have some of the 2010 feature updates. But those using the “Standard” (multitenant) versions do not.
Microsoft didn’t provide specific dates as to when they’d deliver the updates to each of its managed services, but did say the updates would happen in fiscal 2011 (which runs from July 1, 2010, to June 30, 2011). Earlier this year, the Softies said to watch for a “preview” of these BPOS updates before the end of this calendar year, and advised companies to prepare their infrastructure now for these BPOS futures.
The roadmap slides the Softies showed at the partner conference this week look just about identical to the ones I ran earlier. In November 2009, Microsoft shared privately information about the coming 2010 features for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Communications Online. I ran some of this information, shared with me by sources, in various recent blog posts.
According to Microsoft officials this week, here’s what’s coming on the Exchange Online front (from the WPC 2010 slide deck):
(click on the slide to enlarge)
Here’s what’s happening with SharePoint Online:
(click on the slide to enlarge)
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